Discover Exactly Where Your Customers Hang Out Online

Wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which websites your customers and prospects like to visit? Better yet, what if you knew which sites not only generated conversions, but assisted conversions as well? The answers are buried in your customer data.

WHAT YOU NEED

Remarketing Campaigns (Google Adwords)

Simple Code to Capture Referring URL

Lifetime Value by Customer

HOW YOU DO IT

Aside from analyzing which sites refer traffic to your website in Google Analytics, you can also see which sites your customers visit after yours by using remarketing campaigns. The process is simple:

Open Google Adwords and navigate to one of your remarketing campaigns (preferably with high traffic)

Click the “Display Network” Tab

Click the “Placements” Tab

Note: Google likes to update the Adwords interface about a million times a minute, so by the time you read this the tabs you need to click may have changed.

Customer segments based on referring web source and sorted by LTV. Used to determine which web placements, affiliates and partners are worth investing in. What you have now is the list of sites where your remarketing ads are actually being shown. These are the sites people visit after hitting your site. This is highly valuable information you can use to discover new media buy opportunities, partnerships, advertising avenues and more. Simply knowing the sites and whether they convert isn’t really enough though. We can tie in lifetime value and smart data collection to get some actionable insights.

Add a simple piece of code to your site to grab referring URL

Pass that information to your billing system or CDP

Create segments based on referring URL

Sort by LTV in your CDP or manually calculate LTV

You can combine your referral data with web behaviors, interests, demographics and the other tips we have already discussed. This is especially useful if you have a large affiliate network or many paid web partnerships.

Let’s say Site A and Site B both referred 150 sign-ups to your website last month. With lifetime value and segments in your CDP, you discover that customers from Site A stay for 10 months, whereas visitors from site B stay for 3 months. Now you can go back and spend more with Site A, and less with Site B, instead of valuing them as equal partners. And if you choose to use a CDP, you, or anyone else on your marketing team can do it in seconds — without bothering your Billing or Analytics team to dig through purchase data for you.

Was this helpful? Download the full White Paper 10 Ways to Use Data to Increase Conversions for more tips.

Justin is the Demand Generation and Marketing Operations Manager at Umbel. He has strong opinions about pizza, pivot tables and automated workflows...he can also sing karaoke like it's nobody's business.